4. What actions are the Welsh Government taking to promote water safety and drowning prevention in both children and adults? OAQ54011

I thank Joyce Watson for the question. The Welsh Government helps to support water safety through annual funding provided to Swim Wales. Last year, £80,000 was allocated to specific projects designed to develop aquatic opportunities and resources to enable the Welsh population to learn to swim and to learn about water safety.

I thank you for that answer. The fourteenth of June is the start of the Royal Life Saving Society's Drowning Prevention Week and the purpose is to raise awareness around water safety and drowning prevention. Tragically, one person drowns accidentally every 20 hours in the UK and many others experience life-changing injuries as a consequence of near-drowning. That is why awareness-raising campaigns are so important. The Royal Life Saving Society UK, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and Dŵr Cymru work tirelessly throughout the year to raise awareness, and I would like to thank them for their commitment and their hard work.

With the summer holidays just around the corner, that is a peak time for these types of accidents, and I'm sure you'll agree that it's crucial that the water safety and drowning prevention messages are heard loud and clear. The UK drowning prevention strategy between 2016 and 2026 developed by their members aims to reduce drowning fatalities by 50 per cent. And remember that figure—that it's one person accidentally drowned every 20 hours in the UK. That is a scary figure. So, First Minister, what actions are the Welsh Government taking to help those who are aiming to reduce drowning to continue their very good work here in Wales?

I thank Joyce Watson for that question and share very much with her her thanks to those voluntary organisations that do so much in awareness raising and in the direct provision of services. My colleague Lesley Griffiths met with the Royal Life Saving Society in November of last year as part of our water safety strategy development for Wales and officials continue to work with them on the development of that strategy. 

Llywydd, we work with a wide range of organisations that try to bring about the sort of improvement that Joyce Watson has referred to. Dŵr Cymru's One Last Breath campaign, for example, is aimed at safety in reservoirs in Wales and the risk of drowning in inland waters, for example through cold water shock, when young people in particular plunge into a reservoir after a hot day. Dŵr Cymru provides sessions in schools, they provide direct advice, they go on the radio, on social media; all those awareness-raising possibilities to which Joyce Watson refers. And then we directly fund activity here in Wales. Over 11,000 children took part in water safety awareness sessions in Wales in 2018. They involve the RNLI, they involve the Royal Life Saving Society and those sessions were directly the result of funding that the Welsh Government provides.

Sadly the National Water Safety Forum's water incident database shows that 263 people lost their lives in accidental drownings across the UK last year, and only this year, First Minister, just a few weeks ago, a young boy of 13 in my constituency lost his life. River and Sea Sense, however, is a fantastic organisation based in Conwy county borough, and it was set up as a positive response to the tragic drowning of the son of Mrs Debbie Turnbull, Christopher Turnbull, at Capel Curig in 2006. This organisation—really, a sole lady doing this—has educated around 200,000 young people and adults across north Wales about the dangers of open water. She has gone into schools. But a lot of this teaching and awareness building, she's had to do on her own, with very little, if any, funding. Teaching the dangers of open water is essential, so I'm extremely grateful for the work of River and Sea Sense. First Minister, I would like to see our schools do more too, so will you explain what place water safety and drowning prevention will have in the new curriculum going forwards?

I thank the Member for that. I congratulate, of course, her constituent for the work that she carries out in memory of her son, Christopher. We know that right across Wales, there are really dedicated groups of people who take up a cause because they have had that direct personal experience of it in their own lives, and the hours and dedication that they provide to those causes is a remarkable and heartening feature of that sense of community that we are still lucky enough to have in Wales.

The Member is right to point to the importance of what goes on in school. By the end of key stage 2, we are clear that pupils should be able to swim unaided for a sustained period of time, and 64,000 pupils in Wales attended school swimming sessions in the last academic year. Pioneer schools involved in the new curriculum have already recognised that the importance of swimming goes far beyond it just being another mode of physical activity. And in the development of the curriculum through those pioneer schools, the emphasis on swimming has moved towards its safety aspects as well as to its recreational possibilities. So, I know that the Minister for Education is aware of that work and is taking that forward into the broader development of the curriculum on which we are currently engaged.